


Maps

by jouissant



Category: Captive Prince - S. U. Pacat
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-22
Updated: 2014-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-05 19:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1828819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurent, on the eve of two wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [petrichoral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrichoral/gifts).



Laurent rose well after dawn, coming awake slowly with the gnawing sensation he had slept too long, missed something important somehow. The body pressed close to him on the bed brought him back to himself, drenched in a disconcerting yet familiar mix of softness and shame. He shook his head as if he could cast the feeling off that way, but succeeded only in calling his attention back to the table in the center of the room, carved ornately and laden with last night’s scrolls and maps and plans. He’d taken to scribbling notes on scraps of parchment, fingers smudged with stubs of graphite. He found he thought better this way in the absence of a fellow strategist, though lately...lately he’d had less need of note-taking. 

Damen shifted, and for a moment Laurent thought him awake, his plan for this morning complicated beyond salvaging. But Damen simply sighed and murmured something Laurent couldn’t make out, then rolled over to face the wall, leaving a dampened circle on the pillow where his mouth had lain open. Laurent very nearly smiled at that. Before he could, he slid out of the bed to do his toilette. Then he dressed in his riding kit, working the close-fitting leathers up over thighs and hips and buttocks as silently as possible while previously unnoticed muscles protested. He drew on his gloves last of all, summerweight and thin like the leggings. He reached in the direction of the bed and flexed his fingers, the tightness creeping up his arm like a second skin. 

He crossed back to the bed again and stood watching Damen for long minutes, aware as he did so that the sun climbed higher and Damen grew closer to waking. He bit his lip and dropped his gloved hand to Damen’s wrist, running it along the edge of the heavy gold cuff there. 

Damen twitched, and Laurent drew back as if stung. He had lingered too long already. 

“Send him to the blacksmith when he rises,” he said to the guards in the corridor. “Then have him escorted to the border. He’s to be gone before I return.” He didn’t wait for their response, didn’t pause to watch their faces, to guess at whether their long-held suspicions had been confirmed at last, if the stink of sex hung about him as he imagined it did. 

The horse he chose was the skittish paint he and Damen had found wandering, the only concession to sentiment Laurent would allow himself today. He waved off the stableboy, readying his mount himself. He stood in the stall and breathed deeply, the air redolent of sweet hay and leather, the tang of equine sweat. The ran his hand over the paint’s neck, and the animal sighed, regarding Laurent with a jaundiced eye. Laurent traced the outline of an oblong splotch of brown on the horse’s neck and smiled. 

Jord was waiting when he led his mount into the yard. Laurent had removed his gloves to fasten the fiddly buckles on his bridle, and he replaced them now, making a show of ignoring Jord until he did so. 

“Yes?” he said finally. “I haven’t time for additional groveling from you this morning.” 

“My lord,” Jord said, ducking his head. “I wished only to thank you for your goodwill last night. Regarding Aimeric, that is. I--” 

Laurent held up a hand. “Enough,” he said. “Had the slave your captain not been present, I’d have seen your turncoat whore turned out for the whole company.” He let his lip curl as though Aimeric had left some residual olfactory taint upon Jord’s person. 

Jord looked at Laurent’s feet, his jaw working. “My lord,” he said finally. 

Laurent didn’t respond. Instead, he turned back to his horse and lifted the reins over its head, mounting fluidly. He dug his heels into the soft flesh of the beast’s sides, urging it into a leap that forced Jord to throw himself to one side or risk trampling. 

_Unnecessary_ , Laurent thought to himself, adjusting his seat to give the paint his head as they sped through the gates and left the keep behind. Perhaps one more concession, then. He supposed there were worse men than Jord to witness it.

***

“Care to offer your opinion on my technique?”

Laurent looked up from his book with a start. Auguste had stepped into the stands on the periphery of the training ground, where Laurent had secreted himself to read whilst Laurent sparred with Herve the swordmaster. Auguste slid his helm off and tucked it under his arm, his golden hair dark with sweat and plastered to his brow. 

“Needs work,” said Laurent, turning back to the volume on his lap and making a show of turning the page. Auguste snorted, reaching deftly for the book and taking its weight in both hands, inspecting the gold-embossed cover with interest. 

“Only reached the fourth volume of the Histories?” he said lightly. “You’ve fallen off pace.”

“That’s because I’m actually reading them, not merely skipping from battle to battle,” Laurent said. 

Auguste waved his hand dismissively. “Politics,” he said, feigning a gag. “Give me the clash of the battlefield over wheeling and machination any day.” But he was in jest, Laurent knew; of course Auguste had read the Histories, knew them backwards and forwards and sideways. As would--as should--any crown prince of Vere. As Laurent did, simply for the love of knowing. Auguste handed the book back to Laurent with a last wistful look at it, as though recalling the days when all that mattered were the notes in their tutors’ markbooks, long hours spent at history and geography and algebra and penmanship in the oaken light of the palace library. 

“Will you take your lesson now?” Auguste gestured at the swordmaster, busying himself with equipment on the training floor. 

Laurent leaned back on his hands. “Herve looks fatigued,” he said. “It would be cruel to ask it of him, do you not agree?” 

“As if that’s ever stopped you before.” 

Laurent sniffed. “You should bathe,” he said, as if the gesture had been a commentary on Auguste’s state of personal hygiene. “We’ve the reception tonight.” He closed his book and got to his feet, clutching the heavy volume against his chest. The delegation from Akielos had arrived at the palace early that morning, or so said the whispers of the staff. A diplomatic summit, they called it. Optimism, scoffed Laurent’s uncle. Or delusion. A last formality before war. 

Auguste sighed. “As if I could forget,” he said. He scraped his fringe back from his forehead with a grimace. “Come along then,” he said to Laurent. “You could do with a bath yourself. You smell of dust and old vellum.” 

“There are worse things.”  
Auguste smiled, that easy sidelong smile like a slant of sun. “There are.” Later, much later, the memory of that smile would pain Laurent like nothing he could ever imagine on the cusp of fourteen. It would pain him like an axe cleaves. 

Auguste dismissed Herve with a wave, and they walked slowly through the palace together in the direction of the baths, Laurent slowing his stride to match Auguste’s footsore amble. “Father won’t be pleased you missed your lesson,” Auguste said presently. 

“Father will be preoccupied,” said Laurent. He sighed. Ahead of them was a painted girl, clad in golden mail, coming along the corridor like a fish swimming upstream. Laurent watched Auguste catch her eye and smile again, watched the girl drop her head and flush. Laurent frowned. 

“Do you really believe we will treat with the Akielons?” he asked, ignoring the sour flare in his gut.

Auguste blinked. “Pardon?” 

Laurent made a face. “You’re so predictable,” he said. “It’s boring.” 

Auguste threw a last smile back behind him in the direction of the pet. “Boring is the last thing she is,” he said, a little dreamily. 

Laurent rolled his eyes to the rafters. “Tell me again how I’ll understand it all when I’m older.” 

Auguste snorted, flinging an arm out to catch Laurent around the shoulders and tug him in, the motion shaking a huff of breath from Laurent’s lungs, caged as they were within his slight frame. 

“He won’t make six feet,” Laurent’s father had said to his uncle once. They were in the palace greatroom, and he thought Laurent couldn’t hear. At the time the comment had mystified him. Laurent couldn’t understand what the height of a body could possibly matter when one had possession of a halfway capable brain. Laurent’s, of course, was far more than halfway capable, and so he failed to see how his build was relevant at all. 

“He is more than adequate,” his uncle had replied, with a peculiarly proud air that sent a strange kind of warmth through Laurent, though by rights he shouldn’t have cared whether his uncle took his part or not. He’d looked up then and caught his uncle’s eye. His uncle had smiled at him, and Laurent had flushed and returned to his book.

“You’ll understand it all when you’re older,” Auguste said dutifully, rousing Laurent from the memory.

“No,” Laurent muttered. “I don’t think I will.” It didn’t matter anyway, after all. He, like Auguste, would only ever bed one woman. But that was a train of thought that generally made Laurent ill at ease, so he resolved to avoid it for the time being. 

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said louder. “Do you believe we’ll treat with the delegation from Aikelos?” They arrived at the baths, Auguste pushing the heavy door open and shouldering its weight so Laurent could walk through. 

The bathing chamber was empty, Laurent’s question echoing from wall to wall. Auguste didn’t answer, just crossed to one of the low stone benches that ringed the room and began to undress, fiddling with the ties at the bodice of his shirt and cursing softly as he picked a tricky knot free. “Damn these laces,” he said. 

Laurent turned away when Auguste got his top off. The sight of his brother naked made him feel strange in the same way his father’s appraisal had that day in the greatroom, made him feel as if Auguste was somehow present on the other side of a chasm Laurent would not necessarily be able to cross, whether or not he wanted to. He turned to face the wall, sighing as he struggled with his own garments, though his were of simpler make, a child’s clothes. 

Auguste didn’t speak again until they were both submerged in the baths. Laurent watched him slide beneath the surface of the water and sit there long enough to still the ripples that had issued forth in his wake. He came up gasping, hair slicked back over the crown of his head. He leaned back against the edge of the bathing pool and spit out a mouthful of water. 

“That’s disgusting,” said Laurent, which only made Auguste do it again. 

“No,” Auguste said contemplatively. “No, I don’t believe this meeting will succeed. Father is set against it already; Uncle and the rest of his counsellors back him. The Aikelons think us lying serpents.” 

“The Aikelons are brutish,” Laurent said. 

Auguste raised an eyebrow at him. “Does it say so in your histories?” 

“It doesn’t need to.” 

Laurent took up a fat cake of soap, fresh from the savonnery and still wrapped in waxpaper. He unwrapped it and drew the soap through the water in front of him. It smelled of the starry little nightblooming flowers from the old ruin above Acquitart. 

“I don’t want to go to war,” he said petulantly. “Uncle promised to take me to Ravenel before midsummer. He says the library there is bigger than ours, and that they’ve a collection of maps drawn just after Vere annexed the southern territories, from the very first expeditions by Grevet himself.”  
“How do you think Vere came by those lands?” asked Auguste quietly. “Do you think Vask and Patras and Aikelos made us a neat little present of them, all wrapped up with ribbon so you might pore over their topography on your pretty maps?”

Laurent shook his head quickly, the controlled anger in Auguste’s tone striking at his heart sickeningly. “I didn’t mean--” 

“Maps are drawn in men’s blood, little brother. Never forget that.”


End file.
